Comment on "Hey Google, find the nearest Burger King" - "Sure, here is one on the other side of the globe!"

• isildun@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’m not the person who found that, but this is similar to the game Geoguessr. We have three useful data points: you are 2.6 km from Burger King in Italy, that BK is on a street called "Via " and you are 9792 km from Burger King in Malaysia.

  1. The upper BK in Malaysia is not censored, so we have its exact location.
  2. Find a place in Italy that is 9792 km away using the Measure Distance tool on something like Google Maps.
  3. Even though there are potentially multiple valid locations in Italy, we know you’re within 2.6 km of another BK. Florence is sensible because there are BKs near the 9792 km mark.
  4. Once we do that, we can find a spot that is both 9792 km from Malaysia BK and 2.6 km from a nearby BK on a street called “Via”, effectively finding where the image was taken.

  It’s not perfect but it works well! This is the principle by how your GPS works, it’s called triangulation. We only had distance to two points and one of them doesn’t tell us the sub-kilometer distance. If we had distance to three points, we could find your EXACT location, within some error depending on how detailed the distance information was.

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  • MMauro@feddit.it ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Good explanation. Just a tiny detail: “via” in Italian literally means “street”, so not much info there.

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    • isildun@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Oops. Good to know… I guess the main thing was simply that there was a BK in the right place relative to the 9792 km arc then.

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      • dlok@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Isn’t the 9792 street distance though rather than a straight line?

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• Dewe@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Yes a bit lucky but just draw the 9xxx km circle around the MY BK and then I saw the circle go straight through Florence (also Bologna was a likely candidate). Then find a BK within 2.6 km with a fairly long street name and draw a circle, it intersects with the other circle in two places. The obvious one was the parking near Piazzale M.

  I can also get the GPS coordinates at all times from your phone so it was easy to verify I was right.

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• tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Can also make guesses as to where you’re from as well bc not too many languages spell it Malesia

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